


you and me and the devil makes three

by CatchAsCatchCan



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Angels, Angst, Crossroads Deals & Demons, M/M, Memory Alteration, selling your soul to the devil for ur bro
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 16:31:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22591924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatchAsCatchCan/pseuds/CatchAsCatchCan
Summary: The sky is a fading purple and the trees won’t stop rustling the night Travis goes to make a deal with the devil.
Relationships: Travis Konecny/Nolan Patrick
Comments: 27
Kudos: 107





	you and me and the devil makes three

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos to the gc for breaking my heart with this concept and then me not finishing this for like months after. Timelines shifted around vaguely and by vaguely i mean i do what i want and i put the dallas game in the middle of the winter. 
> 
> Title from “didn’t leave nobody but the baby” from o brother where art thou, chapter titles from “the devil went down to georgia”
> 
> Thanks to kt for the beta!!

The sky is a fading purple and the trees won’t stop rustling the night Travis goes to make a deal with the devil. 

It’s beautiful. A night like this last year, he and Nolan would be laid out on his balcony, dizzy with sleeplessness and suppressed laughter, and, if there wasn’t a game the next day, the cheapest beer they could find. 

Once, when they were a little tipsy and it was balmy enough outside that everything seemed like a good idea, they had thrown all of Travis’ couch cushions onto the balcony and never bothered to take them back inside. Nolan had splayed himself out across the pillows on the floor, and Travis had forced himself to tear his eyes away from where Nolan’s shirt rode up over his hips. Objectively, no one should have looked good under the harsh white of Travis’ porch light, but—yeah. 

A year ago, Nolan might have bullied Travis into getting up and making midnight waffles, the kind with strawberries that Nolan pretends aren’t his favorite. Or, maybe they would have fallen asleep outside and woken up with stiff necks, and Travis would have complained until Nolan gave up and drove them both to his favorite diner. 

Travis has spent a lot of time thinking about those nights lately. Even with the season in freefall, everything had been a lot easier. 

But this isn’t last year. Nolan hasn’t laughed in a long while, and Travis is standing at a crossroads in the middle of fuck-all nowhere, Texas. 

When doctors told Nolan they weren’t sure what more they could do about the migraines, it had been after months of tests and medications and cut-off practices. The good days were fewer and fewer, and Travis watched as Nolan got quieter and his eyes got harder with every perceived failure. 

Nolan shoulders every responsibility, Travis knows. Nothing about this is his fault, but Nolan acts like it is, the city acts like it is.

It had been late into the night when Nolan had shown up at Travis’ door, knocking softly and leaning against the doorframe as though he couldn’t quite hold himself upright. He had taken two steps forward and Travis’ arms had come up just in time to stop him from sagging to the floor. 

Through hushed gasps, Nolan had said what Travis had been preparing himself to hear all season long: he might not ever play again, not unless a miracle happened. Nolan had squeezed his eyes shut and taken a deep, shuddering breath that Travis had felt against his chest.

Nolan had always been adamant about not wanting anyone’s pity, so they both pretended he wasn’t crying, even when Travis silently swiped his thumbs over the corners of Nolan’s eyes to brush a few stray tears away.

He hadn’t gone to Travis to have Travis tell him it would get better. He had gone there to break down where no one else could see. 

Sitting there on his cold hallway floor, Travis had known: some time in the coming weeks, maybe not the day after, but soon, Nolan would go to G and the team and tell them he wasn’t going to play again this season—maybe not ever. And when he did, his voice wouldn’t even waver. 

Nolan barely spoke other than to tell Travis what they both already knew and Travis didn't breathe a word, just gripped Nolan’s shoulders like a vice. He knew that if he said anything, his voice would break and Nolan didn’t need to see him cry.

Travis had thought in that moment that he would do anything, would sell his soul, just to hear Nolan laugh again. And well—

Here he is. 

“Here” is the meeting point of the two oldest streets in some old dilapidated town an hour outside of Dallas. 

The gravel intersection is marked with a white cross, the paint chipped and covered in nails from old signs hung up to catch the attention of passersby. The grass is long, and it had scratched at Travis’ ankles when he walked from where he had waved away his taxi. The wind whispers through the branches and he can’t hear any traffic. 

It’s just him, standing in the center of two dirt roads, clutching a quarter in his sweaty palm. 

His old man used to tell him stories, folk tales really, about the crossroads and the men who made their deals with the devil. 

The man working at the gas station, he’d told Travis, had stood at the crossroads in the middle of town and sold his soul for love. The woman singing on the local radio station had asked for a beautiful voice, and the devil had given her all that and more, for a price. The radio had called her music a gift from God, and his dad had laughed and laughed. 

The stories always began the same way. A lonely person stands in the center of an old, marked crossroads and buries a quarter between his shoes. The devil leaves with the coin and a soul, and the person walks away with the impossible made true. 

As a little boy, Travis had sat at his father’s knee and listened intently. He’d always loved magic. 

His dad had never told stories about what happened when you sold your soul for someone else, though. 

When he can’t delay any longer, Travis kneels down, getting gravel all over his pants, and tucks the quarter into the dirt. It’s probably a coincidence, but he swears the grass stops moving the moment the coin is covered. He stands up, dusts his hands off, and feels a little silly. 

He doesn’t know what else to do.

He thinks, “Please, please, please.”

He doesn’t have to wait long. 

The devil is a lot younger than Travis was expecting. His footsteps don’t make a single sound on the gravel, and blonde, chin-length hair whips around a delicate face.

Actually, if Travis squints, the devil looks quite a bit like —

“Nico Hischier?”

The devil grins and it’s Nico Hischier smiling back at him, teeth a little sharper and eyes a little darker than the last time Travis saw him on the ice, but otherwise the very same. 

“Hey, Travis,” the devil says. 

The devil knows his name, and the devil looks like Nolan’s friend, and Travis is clenching every muscle in his body tight to stop from trembling. 

“You— you’re the devil?” he manages to choke out, and because he’s never met a thought he didn’t want to voice, “That’s pretty fucking ironic.”

The devil shrugs. “It’s really more of a part time gig.”

Travis gapes at him. The devil ignores this.

“So, Konecny, what can I do for you?” He spreads his arms, long coat billowing out behind him in the breeze. For the first time, Travis notices the horns curling up from his temple. They shine in the moonlight, and could almost be beautiful. The longer he looks at him, though, the less human Nico seems. 

“Want to be taller? Faster? Lucky in love?” the devil continues.

Travis jolts. “Wha— Taller? No! Well, I mean, it’s not that I wouldn’t like to be— I mean, but I’m— I’m not here for me,” he stutters out, mind whirling with the fact that he’s talking to the devil and about to sell his soul, and apparently the devil thinks he’s short. 

The devil, if possible, smiles a little wider. “You’re here for Patty, then.”

Travis clenches his fists at his sides. “Don’t fucking call him that,” he grits out, proud of the way his voice barely even trembles. 

The devil hums, shrugs, and keeps on grinning. “Why? Patty and I are friends, been friends longer than you two have, if I recall correctly.”

Travis takes a deep breath and forces his fists to unclench. He flexes his fingers a few times before answering. “If you’ve been friends for so long, you’ll help him, right? You can make him better.” He has to. 

The devil shrugs again. “Depends.”

“Depends on _what_?”

The devil smiles and it’s all teeth, just pointed enough to make Travis shiver. “Depends on what you give me in return.”

“Um.” Travis hadn’t really considered the devil asking his opinion on the matter. “I thought you’d want my soul?” It comes out like a question, unsure and unsteady. 

The devil looks unmoved. “Your soul? That’s kind of passé.”

“Please.” Travis squeezes his eyes shut and prays to the wrong god. “Nico, please.”

The devil smiles with Nico Hischier’s mouth but his eyes are deep black and they don’t look at all human anymore. Travis thinks he might see a tail winding behind him, but he doesn’t want to look close enough to check. 

“I don’t want your life, Travis. It’s a little boring, and you can really only eat athletes’ souls a few times before you get tired of the taste of sweat. No, I want something else.”

The devil takes a horrible pause and even the wind stops moving through the trees to listen to what comes next. 

“I want Nolan’s memories of you,” he says, and his grin shows all his teeth. “All of them.” 

Travis can feel his pulse in his ears, a steady thud of _no, no, no_. “How— why— why would you do that to him? I thought you said you were friends!”

“Friends sometimes, yes. Sometimes more than friends,” the devil says, smiling and smiling. 

Travis feels like the wind has been knocked out of him. 

“What can I say? Maybe the devil gets jealous too.”

“Jealous?” Travis asks, over the thudding of his heart.

“He loves you, clearly. Anyone can see it, if they just look.”

Anyone who was looking, except apparently Travis. “He doesn’t— he can’t—”

“Oh, Travis. He wants to spend the rest of his life with you,” the devil says, voice almost a sing-song. Travis hears a little choked-off broken noise and distantly realizes it’s coming from him. 

“He wants to spend the rest of his life with you, and so that’s the price I want: his happiness in exchange for yours.” 

There was never really any choice.

The devil holds out a hand, and through the darkness Travis can make out what might be black, leathery wings or might just be a trick of the eyes. 

“What do you say?” the devil asks. “Will you make him happy?”

The world blurs in front of Travis and he fights the urge to sink to his knees. His breath is coming out too fast, harsh against the quiet of the night. 

This might be what heartbreak feels like.

But heartbreak also feels like watching Nolan retreat into himself. Heartbreak feels like reading the horrible things people say about Nolan online, seeing Nolan smile less and less, watching helplessly as Nolan takes two steps backwards for every step forward. 

He can survive heartbreak if it means Nolan will start smiling again. 

Travis steps forward, takes a deep breath, and opens his eyes.

Travis shakes the devil’s hand. 

Travis takes another series of taxis the few hours to the hotel in Dallas, and makes it back just before four am. 

He’ll be absolutely useless at practice tomorrow, but hopefully the team will think it’s exhaustion from the terrible game they just played, and not from a secret rendezvous with crossroads spirits. 

He sneaks back into his room and collapses on his bed without taking off his shoes. 

Travis sleeps fitfully and finally jerks fully awake at six am. Trying to fall back asleep would be hopeless, so he heads downstairs to the hotel lobby. The place seems mostly deserted except for a hotel clerk who keeps nodding off into her palm, but a few seconds after he sits down, G wanders out of the vending machine alcove holding a pack of peanut M&Ms. 

He frowns when he sees Travis. “TK? Are you feeling alright?” he asks, dropping down onto the couch next to him.

G reaches over, presses a hand to Travis’ forehead. He’s sure he must feel clammy and he’s not entirely certain that he isn’t still trembling, but he shakes his head and says, “I’m fine, G. Swear.”

“Bit early for you to be up, no?” G asks, moving his hand from Travis’ forehead to his shoulder and pulling him against his side. “Want to talk about it?”

Claude has somehow always known when to be a captain and when to be a friend. 

“I’m fine,” Travis repeats, but feels his eyes welling up again. “Well—,” and then he cuts himself off because he’s cried in front of Claude too many times in his life and he really doesn’t want his captain to make him talk this one out. 

“Oh, kid,” Claude says, and his voice is soft. “Whatever it is, I promise it’ll work out. In my experience, it usually does.”

Travis sniffs as quietly as he can and tries to look like he isn’t wiping his eyes. “I don’t—” His breath hitches and he has to swallow a few times to stop his voice from breaking. “I don’t think it will this time.”

Claude hums low and doesn’t reply, but he keeps Travis pressed against his side. Travis focuses all of his attention on the rise and fall of Claude’s chest as he breathes, and slowly he feels the lump in his throat start to fade. 

Claude stays there while Travis takes deep, shuddering breaths. He offers Travis a yellow M&M and Travis takes it, and then they work their way through the bag one at a time. 

Travis is pretty sure Claude is picking out the colors of teams he hates. 

They sit there until the sun starts to come up and it’s dangerously late for them to start packing.

They take the elevator back up to their floor, and Travis tries not to feel guilty about the way G sags against the handrail in obvious exhaustion. He opens his mouth to say something, and he must look slightly apologetic, because Claude just shakes his head and reaches over to ruffle his hair.

The elevator music is something quiet and instrumental, the kind of pretentious cover Nolan would scoff at.

Right before Travis takes out his keycard, Claude turns to him and says, accent a little thick, “Get some sleep on the plane. I promise, everything seems worse at six in the morning.”

Travis can only nod.

He steps off the plane and is almost surprised when nothing feels different. The air in New Jersey is warm and there’s a light breeze. The city feels just like it did before he changed everything.

Except, when he gets back to his apartment, there are things missing. When he had last locked up, Nolan’s hoodie had been draped over the couch and various migraine pamphlets scattered around the kitchen counter. They’ve vanished. 

When he opens the refrigerator door, Nolan’s disgusting beer isn’t there, and neither is the leftover sushi that he should have thrown out a week ago. When he goes into the bathroom, Nolan’s toothbrush is missing, and when he checks his closet, Nolan’s ties aren’t there either. 

Travis hadn’t realized how much of his space Nolan had taken as his own. His apartment feels like a ghost town, and he keeps seeing things out of the corner of his eye that should be there but just aren’t. 

He supposes, conceivably, Nolan could have just decided that he needed to tidy up, but he doubts it. That doesn’t sound like Nolan, and his old man always told him that the devil was in the details. 

He waits half-heartedly for the call he usually gets post-road trip, or the text when Nolan is too tired to talk. It doesn’t come, but he didn’t really expect it to. 

He goes to bed and it’s just as sleepless as the night before.

The first time he actually sees Nolan is two days later, as the team slowly trails into the locker room after morning skate. He’s almost through the doors when Nolan stomps out of the trainers’ office with a new prescription clutched tight in his fist.

Travis freezes and hopes for—something. 

Nolan’s eyes skate over Travis without a hint of recognition. As Travis presses back against the wall and tries to even out his breathing, Nolan walks straight past him to talk to someone. Probably Kevin, by the honking laughter that follows a moment later. 

His knees feel weak and he can’t take a full breath. 

It worked. 

It worked, it worked, and Nolan is going to get better and smile more and Travis is never going to have him again. 

He stumbles into the locker room, pushes past a wildly gesticulating Kevin, and collapses into his stall. He’s never put this much focus into unlacing his skates, but when he looks up, Nolan is still there, tall and indignant and radiating irritation, if the way his hands fold and refold the prescription paper is any indication. 

Travis stares at him, memorizing his features. He wishes he had gotten to say goodbye, or something. 

Nolan is cleared to practice two weeks later, as slightly baffled trainers shake their heads but agree that the most recent medication has worked like a charm. 

“An absolute miracle,” one of them had said, when Travis had lingered outside of their office one afternoon after practice. 

When the other doctor murmured, “Thank god,” Travis had clapped a hand over his mouth to stop a hysterical laugh from echoing down the hall. 

Nolan starts attending practices regularly, though never staying on the ice the full time and with a trainer watching closely. 

Slowly, tension Travis hadn’t even noticed begins to seep out of the locker room and the doctors’ shoulders relax as Nolan stays healthy and stays healthy and stays healthy. 

The team welcomes him back with open arms, one month migraine free when he walks into the locker room and announces with a slight note of wonder in his otherwise monotone voice, “I’ve been cleared for contact.” 

G whoops and throws his helmet in the air, while Carter fist pumps and Kevin fully throws himself at Nolan. 

“Careful, careful with the head,” Nolan grumbles, but his bright eyes betray how goddamned happy he is. Nolan wearing orange and a barely contained smile is the best thing Travis has seen since the season started. 

Nolan hasn’t spoken to him in a month. Travis doesn’t think he’s even looked at him.

Sharing a locker room again is a strange adjustment. A few people shoot them weird glances the first time Nolan sits at the far end of the room, seven stalls away from Travis. After a day, the looks fade away to nothing as everyone’s memories smooth over and adjust to the new normal. 

The only one who doesn’t forget, who can’t make himself forget, is Travis. 

Travis didn’t realize just how much time he spent with Nolan until suddenly he can’t. 

Neither of them were particularly good at texting, but they lived close enough that most of the time, Travis would just hammer on Nolan’s door until he gave up and spent the afternoon with him. Sometimes, Nolan would do the same.

He liked to pretend to be detached. Travis could see right through him every time.

Nolan isn’t going to spend any more afternoons with Travis. His place seems a lot emptier now, especially on the sunny days when last year Nolan would have spread out on Travis’ rug and dozed off in the light streaming in from the windows. 

It feels like something is haunting Travis’ apartment, the way he keeps expecting to see Nolan every time he turns around. 

Nolan doesn’t ride with him to the rink anymore and suddenly Kevin’s car starts appearing outside their building every morning. Nolan doesn’t get lunch with him, unless its a team event, and Travis tries as hard as he can to stop remembering how they used to steal food off each other’s plates as easy as breathing.

It’s easier to recognize that Nolan was in love with him, now that he’s not. Never let it be said that the devil doesn’t do his job well.

**Author's Note:**

> I have been kicking this idea around for ... so long. My goal is to update this roughly every other Friday at the latest. Hope you enjoy! 
> 
> (Also, I do like nico hischier and i'm sure he's a swell guy, the joke was just WAY too good to pass up)


End file.
